We have no authentic tradition regarding this tempera painting, which in my judgment is the most beautiful of the easel pictures attributed to Michelangelo.

Internal evidence from style renders its genuineness in the highest degree probable.

No one else upon the close of the fifteenth century was capable of producing a composition at once so complicated, so harmonious, and so clear as the group formed by Madonna, Christ leaning on her knee to point a finger at the book she holds, and the young S.John turned round to combine these figures with the exquisitely blended youths behind him.
Unfortunately the two angels or genii upon the left hand are unfinished; but had the picture been completed, we should probably have been able to point out another magnificent episode in the composition, determined by the transverse line carried from the hand upon the last youth's shoulder, through the open book and the upraised arm of Christ, down to the feet of S.John and the last genius on the right side.

Florentine painters had been wont to place attendant angels at both sides of their enthroned Madonnas.

Fine examples might be chosen from the work of Filippino Lippi and Botticelli.